Kim Jong Un’s uncle has been executed, with North Korean state media calling the leader’s former mentor ‘worse than a dog’.

It comes days after Pyongyang announced that Jang Song Thaek had been removed from all his posts because of allegations of corruption, drug use, gambling, womanising and generally leading a ‘dissolute and depraved life’.
The state news agency KCNA said a tribunal examined Mr Jang’s crimes, including ‘attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.’

The report called him ‘a traitor to the nation’. Mr Jang was considered the second most powerful official in the North. He was seen as helping Kim Jong Un consolidate power after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, two years ago.

Some analysts see the purge as a sign of Kim Jong Un’s growing confidence, but there has also been fear in Seoul that the removal of such an important part of the North’s government – seen by outsiders as the leading supporter of Chinese-style economic reforms – could create dangerous instability or lead to a miscalculation or attack on the South.

Tensions are still high on the Korean Peninsula following a torrent of threats in March and April by Kim Jong Un’s government against Washington, Seoul and Tokyo, including vows of missile and nuclear strikes and warnings that Pyongyang would restart nuclear bomb fuel production.

He was earlier described by state media as ‘abusing his power’, being ‘engrossed in irregularities and corruption’, and taking drugs and squandering money at casinos while undergoing medical treatment in a foreign country. -By Mark Duell

Together: Kim Jong Un (front centre) is followed by Jang Song Thaek (left) during father’s burial